The general purpose of the proposed research program is to examine when and how a perceiver's state of arousal influences judgments and memory about others. The research is part of a systematic effort to investigate the role of emotional response to individuals in the formation and maintenance of prejudicial attitudes, with particular concern for the part that arousal which accompanies interpersonal contact plays in person judgments. Three experiments are proposed to investigate the nature of, the limits to, and the mechanisms underlying the influence of arousal on person perception. In the first experiment, the role of arousal in the minimal intergroup effect will be studied. Based on findings of recent experiments that have shown that arousal makes judgments of others more extreme, arousal is expected to exaggerate the influence of positive expectancies about ingroup members and negative expectancies about outgroup members on judgments of individuals. In the second two experiments mechanisms that can account for arousal-based influences on social judgments will be tested. Specifically, in Experiment 2 the role of misattribution of arousal is tested, and in Experiment 3 the possibility that arousal influences social judgments by cueing extreme constructs from memory is studied. An understanding of which mechanisms underly the effect of arousal on social judgments has implications regarding the extent to, and the conditions under which arousal will influence person perception, as well as for the role that emotional response to individuals plays in person judgments. It is expected that the results of these studies will serve as a foundation for the development of a comprehensive model of the influence of arousal on social judgment in general and on intergroup attitudes more specifically.